Taste: opens with crisp sweetness mixed with a peculiar grassiness, cooked string beans, and generic fruit esters that fade into bittersweet oak and vegetation near the back. After dilution the sweetness becomes somewhat cleaner and pushes back the vegetal/metallic bitterness a bit until the end, bigger fruit notes come out around the middle, but the constituent elements remain largely unchanged.

Despite what my tasting notes would suggest, this was initially somehow less bad than the previous release. It's still nothing I would drink for pleasure, but I found it less difficult to struggle through the sample. On the other hand, it also didn't improve noticeably during the second tasting. This may be because it's a sample from a full bottle, so it had already aired out as much as it was going to, in comparison to a miniature that had been opened for the first time. So not the worst thing I've drunk, but still nothing that anyone should pay money for.

And yet! People still do, because of the current obsession with closed distilleries people have paid well over $200 for a bottle of this pond water. Just goes to show the importance of independent reviews. Between the three of us who have written about this bottle, I would like to think that no one will ever be so foolish as to buy it at auction again. But I know the market and that will probably happen anyway. Their loss.